


let the ghosts sleep tonight

by outlaw_baby



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Angst, F/F, First War with Voldemort, Friends to Lovers, Mutual Pining, Post-Hogwarts, fairly realistic depictions of war and grief and death, midly useless lesbians, mild body horror
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-17
Updated: 2020-07-17
Packaged: 2021-03-05 02:08:30
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,078
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25342969
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/outlaw_baby/pseuds/outlaw_baby
Summary: Dorcas smiles with her mouth corners and they listen to the Germs for hours, until they’re asleep and the world is a folded over deep, wallowing blue from corner to corner. And Marlene has her head on her elbows thinking about how much Dorcas Meadows, witch and part time shop clerk, deserves the love of another woman so bad it hurts her skeleton even in sleep.Or, the war makes ghosts of the bones and Marlene still finds it in her skeleton to be a useless lesbian, grief ridden and all.
Relationships: Marlene McKinnon/Dorcas Meadowes
Comments: 1
Kudos: 11





	let the ghosts sleep tonight

**Author's Note:**

> thank u my dear love and devotion car.o.lyn. for reading my work and making such exquisite comments....
> 
> if ur reading hp fanfic in this day and age also consider taking an active role in supporting trans lives!! (Links for donation/direct action):
> 
> Trans Women of Color Collective: https://www.twocc.us/
> 
> Brave Space Alliance in Chicago: https://www.bravespacealliance.org/
> 
> The Okra Project: https://www.theokraproject.com/
> 
> Solutions Not Punishment Collaborative: https://www.snap4freedom.org/home
> 
> National Center for Transgender Equality: https://transequality.org/about

Prelude

–

Back a while ago, when she still believed in time and sin and her own body and the Beatles, her hair had been long and intricate. Her mother puzzled over every kink until it was all knotted in place and long down her back. Personal vanity, of course, is a liability now and so it’s cut close to her scalp and just a little curly. She likes seeing her cheekbones though, and the way shadows deepen between her ears and mouth. 

–

She lives right there on the cusp of her chest like her own self is a breath she’s been trying to hold and how does that work? 

She lives next to a streetlight really, which is a gaudy orange and a constant knife through her curtains (why had she thought paisley was a good idea?) and ugly. She sleeps in the ugly orange with a sheet tucked to her chin. Sometimes, on Sundays when work is careening closer and her body is tired from the chase already, she spends mornings, afternoons, evenings, in the same spot, legs tucked and streetlamp limp to her right. 

It is this close to living.

–

Exodus

–

On the first day there is rain. And the second there is more rain. And the third sizzles the water on the pavement until the earth is parched again. That’s called summer.

Looking out at the abyss of nothing and more nothing reaching farther than her slim imagination or the blur of her vision, she notices that cut down the thick glass of her bedroom window there is a single crack that has possessed itself and slithered down the length of the glass. Which means as day rises the sun squints through her window jaggedly and she has a moving shadow scar across her abdomen. And when night falls and she returns herself to the dusty floorboards and empty mattress springs of her room, slumped over herself and darkened by night, the streetlamps cast her in a crooked orange and her body is shaped by this crack in her wall. 

–

“Maybe I am the scar. Or no, the scar was the meaning of Christmas all along, is that how that one goes?” She laughs and laughs and Dorcas stops fiddling with her keys for long enough to look her dead in the face and convey a near decades’ worth of disappointment. Mostly through the absolutely charming hang of her lower lip down past the gap in her front teeth. It catches Marlene in a peculiar angle of affection and annoyance.

“Darling, for a moment there I was sure you were on to something,” Dorcas, with a stinger of a glint in the whites of her eyes, shakes her head and tries the third key on the ring which also doesn’t turn. She manages a small self-deprecating frown. “If you stopped pretending you weren’t a genius maybe you’d’ve done better in school and maybe you’d be I don’t know doing cutting edge research on the mating patterns of halfbreed giants instead of kicking around cursed things at the Ministry.”

“I like kicking things. Makes you feel strong.”

“How strong you’ll feel-“ Dorcas pushes at the door, mutters a spell they both figure her roommates could explain away anyways and they’re in the apartment, “-when you’ve gotten yourself cursed.”

“Pish posh. I’d enjoy a good cursing. Spice things up. Who needs a sex life when you’ve got slugs out your nose?”

“Metaphorically speaking,” Dorcas says loudly as they walk by the living room and the three very magicless university students give them waves that Marlene, with a wink in the thin one’s direction, exuberantly returns.

“Whatever that might mean,” Marlene mumbles and they cackle like popping popcorn out their guts, a hard worn childish merry, when the door is closed behind them. Dorcas goes about unpacking her records, absent, and Marlene browses the top of her dresser for scraps of Dorcas to pick over when she’s alone and it’s rainy and her best friend fuzzies herself to a mystery insider her interior lobe, to be reformed into Dorcas by these very scraps and bits. Today she finds a half smoked joint, two bottles of perfume, unopened, five leaflets scrunched up and wet taken from some sad communist cause who looked just desperate enough, and candy wrappers smeared with melted chocolate. 

She can see Dorcas licking her fingers, rolling the joint, and since she, Marlene, is only an unsteady work ethic and four boxes of pasta at this point in her adult life the sensuality of her best friend using her tongue is enough to make her black out and heat up in less than an instant. She scolds her brain for such extreme depravities, with a nod to the spectacular realism and ingenuity her lofty, lesbian brain can manifest from thin air. She turns to Dorcas and leans back against the dresser drawers and does these normal motions which most humans perform naturally, and she does so with great strain to the hemorrhages in her middle section.

“You know,” Dorcas says all slow and holding. She is sliding (GI) out its case and Marlene worries the poor record will soon be worn so thin it won’t speak a word. “My roommates thought we might be fucking. With all that whispering and listening to loud music we do in here.”

“Must have been a good day for the old ego.”

Dorcas turns to her with a half cocked smile, “Up until that point, more like.”

“I’m a catch.”

“They were very supportive of my lesbian attitudes.”

“Nice of them.”

“Sometimes I think with girls it’s like more okay. But also less okay.” Dorcas runs her fingers over the vinyl, slowly, coaxing out her own thoughts like she does when she’s too quick and excited for the silly make believe of predicates and verbs and it all tries to fly out of herself. “Like with girls guys think it’s hot and pay to see it to reaffirm their puffed up masculinity and that’s all well and good as long as the women don’t fall for each other.”

“Mmmm. Very dangerous to have women out and about, not caring about them. They might fuck around and ask for rights.”

“Yeah.”

“Personally I like my women without ‘em.”

“Men?”

“Rights. Can’t get to full of yourself.” Dorcas laughs in the way that is scrunching up her nose, puffy and red, and she adds, “It's why you’re not my type. Who do you think you are? Girl gangs, smoking pot, communism, always forcing your innocent friends to sneak into punk shows without paying, that ill advised vagina graffiti, now fucking women?” She shakes her head, “Reprehensible.”

“You like it when we sneak into things, miserly bitch. You wouldn’t do anything fun without me.”

“Would too.”

“Masturbating and drinking alone doesn’t count.” Her thumbs are in their classic thinking positions, tossing around her belt notches in slow circles, “You wouldn’t so much have opened up a liquor bottle if I hadn’t gotten you to. You’re still mad we got kicked out your favorite bar for pummeling those guys. Who deserved it.”

“You slashed their tires.”

“They tried to grope you.”

“I’m mad because they were magicless and without my glorious fists we would’ve been fucked.”

“Probably,” and she says it with a wink.

She wants to say something encouraging, one gay to the next, but she manages, “Well fuck ‘em. We’ll find you a woman to fuck so you forget what exactly a man is.”

“Yeah.” Dorcas nods and they’re standing a bed apart in the room with the slanted ceiling and twinkling little fairy lights and three hundred odd dust motes spiraling in their own galaxy between them. They’re worlds away.

And Marlene says, “You want to fall in love with a girl?”

“A little.”

Marlene, lungs gone to dust, raises a slim eyebrow and says, “Peachy, darling, first thing tomorrow I’ll start the hunt.”

Dorcas smiles with her mouth corners and they listen to the Germs for hours, until they’re asleep and the world is a folded over deep, wallowing blue from corner to corner. And Marlene has her head on her elbows thinking about how much Dorcas Meadows, witch and part time shop clerk, deserves the love of another woman so bad it hurts her skeleton even in sleep.

–

“I’ve met her certainly,” Marlene starts and Dorcas look mutely at her toenails, sitting on the single piece of furniture she owns (as in paid twenty pounds for at a yard sale) in her entire apartment, which she didn’t steal off street corners or glean from her parents’ attic. It’s ripped across the back rather gapingly, and the yellow foam inside looks a bit too queasy to be natural and all in all the thin leather isn’t the most comfortable experience for the rear or (in Dorcas’s case) the out stretch of two legs across an armrest. But to possess is to possess and the sort of vindication which comes from a shitty purchase made from one’s own money is exquisite freedom only the recently reality beaten can truly understand. As a hardly self sufficient, graduated teenager with the mounting of a drinking problem and war at the ends of her bones, to own space in the world is conquest.

When there’s a long stretch of silence Dorcas finally says, “Who have you met now?” looking up at the ceiling, curling her toes. The setting sun then is crossing her through the blinds, pale orange stripes across her body, and she’s the same exhausted orange of the polluted sun. Marlene quirks up a smirk and walks her over a glass of tap water without thinking of how she looks as tired as old dirt. 

“Your future lady love.” She sits down, moving Dorcas’s legs, and adds, “She works in the Fungal division of Natural Divination. I met her at the cafeteria and get this, she’s into foreign films and the fish they serve on Tuesdays.”

“A true testament to her character.”

“If she can not only stomach but enjoy that fish then she’s surely a hardy woman.”

“That’s what I need, a hardy woman.”

“What with the war on it’s good to have a rock.”

Dorcas slumps low in the dark, probably unthinkably dirty, divide of the couch cushions, and she says in that sleepy voice of hers, “Marlene you are my rock.”

“Best not to lean on me. Too drunk to stand straight. Besides, I prefer to be the loose cannon friend who you find a little sexy but intimidating and also impossible to understand. Like a, like a sexy mystery of what’s she going to do next that wild child, you know?”

“Not even remotely. What are you talking about? You’re none of those things.”

Marlene pouts at the curved bones of Dorcas’s ankles and holds all her identity confusion behind the marrow of her teeth. “Am I at least your sexy friend?”

“No.”

“Am I at least sexy?”

“Now that you are.”

“I can live with that.”

“Sexy in a dependable way.”

“Dependably sexy, I can live with that.”

“I mean more that you’re not a loose cannon. You get shit done. You’re there.”

“Glad to be here,” Marlene says and pats Dorcas’s legs with no little amount of force.

“Me too.”

Marlene watches Dorcas sip at her water from the corner of her eye, and the evening, shortening these days, thinning as the puffed up summer clouds do, descends on them quick as thieves and yellow as wilted flower petals. There are sirens and now Marlene hardly hears them except as you hear crickets or street cars. Dorcas is cool on her thighs.

“How’s work?” Marlene asks.

“Oh you know busy as bunnies we are what with the real demand for embroidered tablecloths and antique china.”

“So then you read anything good waiting on customers to rustle the dust and buy a trinket fountain pen?”

“Taming of the Shrew.”

“William again? Darling try, I don’t know, a Bronte or Woolf or who’s her face who wrote about manners, there are plenty of people to read besides his ancient highness.”

“I’ll read them all eventually. This one’s good.”

“You say that about every one as if you wouldn’t swoon over any check or grocery list he scribbled out.”

“Fine.”

They drain seconds down like tea dredges until the clock says 9 and not even their hung silences can’t stop it. Marlene wonders sometimes why they do this. But with their bones pressed close and griefs laying on each other for rest among the dead stars and sickly shrouds of orange streetlamps she understands at least why Dorcas comes and they talk for three hours and slow time with the magic that vibrates off their skin.

“Time then?” Dorcas asks and it seems she is weighing down the air around her with the dower frown pulling on her face.

Marlene tests out a smile which probably looks as sturdy as toothpicks but she tries nonetheless. “Yeah, we’ll already be the last ones there. You don’t have a mission tonight do you?”

“No. Tomorrow though.”

“Come back to mine?”

Dorcas, with her toes outstretched and eyes fading into themselves, grins wickedly, “I’ve got this album you just have to hear. I can get it from mine before we come back.”

“Deal.”

“Deal. Now let’s go before Mary gets any ideas.”

Marlene can’t guess what that would mean but she takes Dorcas’s hand which is a little sweaty and always soft as violets and they apparate into the dead grass behind the usual ramshackle house. They can already see the thin shadows of people toiling around inside. And they walk in, Marlene letting go of Dorcas, knees still knocking from the spatial-temporal displacement which even the magic lined body has trouble adjusting to. 

They join the rest of the Order, pinned down and skinned on the spot by the shabby fluorescent light which drowns and drains them. They pretend to be adults who can comprehend the massive scale of death which this war has wrought, but Marlene knows she can’t understand the numbers, she only understand what is close at hand; and that is Dorcas, who is alive and beating and blinking time by with eyes set for the future, and that is Frank and Alice Longbottom, who are not. 

Marlene thinks her bones say this. That in this place where they all shed and shed and die and die until they are only the core of who they are, an ancient riddle of anatomy hit by a sledge hammer, Marlene is short sighted, egocentric, and her heart only swells for the blue pulses of the people she can graze with the pads of her own fingers. She cannot comprehend anything else. To comprehend what it means for thousands of innocent people to lose their lives would mean to crumple and harden on the spot, the pit of this overripe fruit called war. It would mean, by this point, to lose to the side which would make it all worse. Marlene nearly chokes on her own tongue trying to think all this and make conversation with one hustled looking Emmeline Vance with moons for eyes and hollow craters for cheeks. She has spit and blood on her knuckles though and Marlene supposes that’s what counts. And Dorcas, right by her, listening to her stumble over a sorry excuse of a commentary on this weeks sunny weather, she is alive enough to take her hand. And through this tangling fog of life lost and desperation this is what matters.

–

After it all ends, they are just two tumbling bodies, cold at the fingertips and loose at the coatsleeves. Instead of the dutiful cadets of a magical war putting on sorrowful faces to match those of the rest of the Order. In the icy pools of streetlamps, dodging puddles as they walk back from Dorcas’s place to Marlene’s, sliced in the backs of their necks by the needlepoint of the moon, they laugh and laugh, about nothing and the cosmos and the heat density between two attracted objects. It’s so loud it’s sirens in the dead of it all.

And they find themselves, still ice sharp from the outside and the knock back of each other’s laughter still alight in the central nervous system, face to face in the bed, all their clothes on, knees knocking, smiling as if they’ve lost control of their lips.

“I don’t know what’s going to happen,” Dorcas says and her eyes have streetlamp light pooled in the deepest of their brown. And she smells like brandy from two hours ago and rancid small spaces. “With the war. I’m, I’m fucking terrified of losing you and Mary and Emmerline and,” she licks her lips, “and everyone else. And fuck I’m so terrified of dying myself. Like, I just shake sometimes in the shower thinking about how I could die. And Marlene, you could die. I want to do everything to stop that from happening.” She is whispering and Marlene knows nothing else except for Dorcas and the spill out of her words and the tumble of her hair.

“We could run away tonight,” Marlene says softly, “Never look back. Become waitresses in some American diner and start a new life.”

Dorcas’s smile is candle soft. “And we could have cats. And we could grow plants, flowers, so many flowers.”

“And I’d buy you so many books to read that aren’t William Shakespeare. And,” Marlene opens up her lips around a soft puff of breath and she is between gasping out everything her heart has ever beat out on the inside of her chest and laughing the moment away, unsure even then of her own throat. She says, “And we’d sneak in punk shows in that mythical D.C. And I’d have you.”

“And I’d have you,” Dorcas whispers.

“Why not?” 

Dorcas reaches out with her fingers and touches her head, where her hair is short and curled. “Why not?”

“We’ve got to do the right thing.”

“And all our other friends.”

“And there is that awful dark magic business about.”

“That too.”

“I don’t know what’s to happen either Dorcas.”

“No. But I just know I need to keep you close. Marlene, I-“

There’s a tap at the window and they both sit up, breathing hard like resurfacing, but there is nothing, not even a car rushing past. And the slim moon gives them a wink.

“Just a gust of wind or rock or some shit,” Marlene says, laying herself back down. Dorcas looks down on her with her heavy held eyes, weighing down her sockets so the wrinkles look thick as mountains. She’s tired these days. 

“Lay down with me dork,” Marlene adds and Dorcas does, so the bed dips and they’re sinking together. 

“What was I saying?” Dorcas asks.

“Fluffy, feelings stuff. We’ve got time to say it all and back again, to the sun or stars or whatever. Just take your socks off and listen to the moon.”

“Sure,” Dorcas says, her mouth soft. Marlene knows, really, what she has done to their little moment of pressing chests and wiped faces and held star spots. She doesn’t feel any remorse for the slaughter of their ghostly seconds.

She lies and lies herself to sleep.

–

Interlude

–

She has a certain bone chiller of a smile that Marlene hasn’t seen since graduation. Dorcas could pull it off like genetic code and muscle fit and you could aways read it. It looked of electricity and kinetics and speed and loud music. That slice of lip pull would always, inevitably, start this horrible and horribly noxious engine of cramped teenager girl limbs down the halls of too tight castles, out windows, under paved stones, fumbling through bars. They’d drink their sixteen year old selves silly, all pinned as dolls under that devil’s point of a smirk Dorcas wore as battle paint.

“Into the night, ladies,” she’d whispered so loudly the stones would chant and ring.

And Marlene, closed lipped, listening to the excited titters of the stones against her back, she’d dash along with Dorcas and Mary and Emmerline, all children of the night winds, bandits of silence. Dead ringing left in their wake. She got well and truly plastered exactly once and Dorcas, veined with vodka likely, lugged her up the stairs and took her socks off. And Marlene tried to kiss her thank you and ended up licking her cheek instead, apparently. Which meant a shaky sobriety and no more second hand spoon fed rumors of truth to gurgle in the dim dawn of mornings after. This all of course, because Dorcas, big brained and wide minded, settled her muscles into a smile so irresistible Marlene feels a certain tug up her arteries just to think of it.

–

The weekdays are the kind of multivitamins she remembers her mother slipping down her throat when she still lived at home and her limbs were small and her mother, who worried and was forever facing outward, a bird watching their own home’s foggy windows–her mother cared for the inches she would need to put on. They were always large down her throat and seemed to lodge themselves there for five hours. As a child of course you think nothing of what the things you swallow do to your body, hence the heavy glue chewing days of the adolescence. And as an adult, swallowing barrelfuls of murky clouds and seasick, green grief and the days and days which you won’t remember because they are all little soldiers of the army of the already forgotten, you try not to think of how your body is opening in ways you wish it wouldn’t. Marlene personally feels a twinge in the upper back and a sort of dulling to her nails and a certain weedy overgrowth in her spine.

She is unsure these days, in the thinning autumn air of late September, lungs spilt over with the fog and wisps of sky and twilights gone missing, whether all her atoms are the same as they were, even her ribs. Or if through the battles and curses her bone joins have been swapped with identicals and she is left floating around in this carbon copy rip off of Marlene McKinnon. None the wiser.

She hopes it isn’t so. And between the sadness and stripped trees there is enough Marlene McKinnon left to recognize herself in the mirror at night, even in the dark.

She’s startled from her thoughts when her feet take her to her desk and she’s forced to process the physical world. The man who sits across from her with marbles for eyes, very literally, smiles thinly and she gives him a hello and a how are you which he nods vaguely to and they go about their work.

The multivitamin of Friday brings with it a cursed blueberry crumble which had an unfortunate pox riddling spell (it turned out to be the tin and not the pastry itself) which caused the chef who made it a spontaneous break out of purple polka dots (which did resemble blueberries) across her hands and up her arms. It is all wildly absurd and she thinks of how she’s going to tell this story later to get her friends to split their seams and more specifically she thinks of laying her head down on her pillow and looking into Dorcas’s eyes, smiling closely, and getting her to roll on her back and cry with her peals of laughter. She thinks hard about this, at lunch looking at Dorcas’s future hardy lady love and despising her for her lovely cheekbones. And later in the evening, finishing up a routine de-cursing of multiple gold heirlooms, she thinks about this gold warm feeling of making one of your favorite people laugh rather than the dirty and cold floors of her apartment which surely will be greeting the soles of her feet as Dorcas shudders behind bushes and breathes the same air as death.

–

“You could use a drink,” Mary says to her and she gives a start. Her body is halfway out the Ministry entrance, about to wobble with the concealing charms, and the rest of her is neatly tucked away behind an eon of bedsheets and idle thoughts on Dorcas’s loosely angled conversational smile of midnight nonsense talks (a particular favorite among her annals of Dorcas categorization) and sun ripples falling softly across her sofa.

“Oh hell,” she splutters and Mary grabs her arm to steady her, “Drink? Gods yes and please tell me you know a place nearby.”

Mary, nearly swamped by her curly perm, brightens her little face up and her eyes give a well worn crinkle, “I do in fact. With IPA’s for you and a gin and tonic for me. On me, my parents are in town and seeing the slovenly lifestyle the war has pressed onto their delicate daughter’s frame they have so generously given me booze and bra money.”

Marlene, steadied on her own legs and feeling the rush of cool wake her drooping eyes from the haggard yellow which the lights in the office dilute the pupils and skin, replies, “And what more, Mary dear, could you possibly ask for, to pull you from your degenerate life?”

“Not a single thing! So drink with me!”

“I could,” Marlene begins, “use a bra as well if you care to share that part of your fund with your most favorite of friends.”

Mary winks at her, says something foul in her ear, something Marlene feels crawling deeply in her spine, and it all bubbles into a gaudy grin, the kind she didn’t know she could afford. 

“God that’s about the most action I’ve gotten in months,” Marlene says and Mary winks so nastily it all spins until they’re at a bar, legs hung with rain, not yet dried, hands busy around the gestures of life, the life in between war hung meetings and war hung frowns. They articulate this life until it feels fuller than air and they can think they have more to express of themselves than what the war chokes out their mouths. 

“You see Dorcas a lot now?” Mary says, breezily, sipping quaintly at her third gin and tonic.

“Do I?”

“You do.” Mary has a way of hanging her words up and waiting oh so patiently for it all to fall. “You fucking or what?”

“Or what,” Marlene says dryly, burps, tilts so she can feel where the axis of the Earth is. 

“Hm.”

“Yeah, hm.”

“Is it the war?”

“Sure.”

“You can’t use that as an excuse, you can’t let it be the excuse.”

“I’m doing a good job of it so far.”

“Don’t define yourself around how sad you are.”

“I’m not that sad.”

“Sure you are, dumbass. You like to pretend that the you up in your head is so separate from the you in the rest of your body, the you we all see, but it’s not. We’re all wrecked in different ways. Might as well fuck who you want. Fuck her. Fuck it.”

“I’m not myself lately.”

“Sure you are. Think Dorcas would want to fuck a stranger inhabiting your body? Blow yourself.”

“Thanks.”

“She’s liked you since school. She likes you just the same.”

Marlene laughs and laughs and laughs and laughs. Oh it’s not the same, the way they huddle from dead things beside each other, the way the sharp tooth of the night bites through sheets and glass, the way not even their hands, pulled together, stop, anymore, ghosts infesting the private places of dreams unfolding. Oh the way their bodies love is like fighting, now. Oh it hurts so bad to love Dorcas and all her unwhole things. She can only imagine the agony of wanting to fuck the ghost ridden crater of Marlene. 

“Maybe you’re right,” Marlene lies and it’s one of many, “Maybe we should fuck, and fuck some more, and then never speak again, fall apart, fuck it all up. Why not?”

“Don’t be cruel.”

“It’s a cruel thought.”

“Don’t be cruel to me because of it.”

“Sorry.”

“Don’t be.”

She lets pass lungs of stale, musty air through her gritted teeth, to shutter like dying flies into a meaning called reason and death, and all her words drop like this, like flies, “It’ll happen one day, not today, it’ll just happen, and fuck I’m scared for it Mary. I’m not stupid. I just don’t have any idea, no fucking clue, what we’ll be to each other after it all happens. What does it all mean now? What does a relationship like ours mean? Like who’s to say who lives or dies, what we’ll have do along the way. It’s all collisions. I don’t know how to say it.”

Mary says, “It’s okay, I know.”

Marlene thinks of two starred supernovas, the diagrams she saw in astronomy, thinks of them spiraling closer, gravity entangled, unescapable heat masses, near event horizons of potentiality, unbreakable, thinks of birds in barbed wire, leaves in gutters, boats caught on rocks, lightning stinging metal rods, hair tangled in bubblegum, fingers snapped in doors, Ophelia split open by rocks, of Dorcas under her thighs, oh the magnetism of a fatal end. 

“Come home with me?” Mary says.

She almost thinks it’s a come on.

–

Mary fusses with her shoelaces until her boots are off and the hole worn socks of hers wriggle under the moon’s glow and she can hardly feel the sting of its wink up her skin, on this sofa of Mary’s, maroon in the day and in the night abyssal as trenches. Her body sinks into this trench of nothing as Mary kisses her cheek, she yawns an I love you, and in turn swallows up a thick blackness of sleep upon sleep upon sleep. It’s a blink until morning and she only dreams once of drowning.

–

It’s over an omelet, which Marlene made with Mary hovering over her shoulder and making ticking noises with the sharp of her tongue all the while, that Marlene asks if she’s heard anything of last night’s mission. Mary looks up from her mail and says, “Oh no, nothing like that. Got some spam again from that insurance company.” She inclines her wrist towards a brightly lettered piece of stationary with Mary’s name sprawled across the top in bold lettering.

“They’d say something if it went badly, wouldn’t they?”

Mary doesn’t look up from her newspaper and she’s breathing shallowly through her nose. She sets it down, flattening it across the table with steady, slow hands and her eyes, gone wavy like when she’s thinking the syllables of a spell very hard, are two inches to the left of Marlene’s skull and staring at whatever hangs over her shoulder there. “I want to lie to you but I can’t.” A staccato of an intake. “I’m not sure they’d say a thing.”

“Yeah, I don’t think they would either.” And in the glacial stillness of the afternoon sun and dirty dishes and clothes of yesterday, Marlene tucks this truth away. It is all quiet now, except for her low breath, but the rest of it only deepens her chest, a lagoon of things her body is taking on. 

Mary breathes out her nose again and Marlene, hands held at angles away from the table, says, “Peachy. Can I have the crossword?”

–

It’s well past midday and she’s frustratedly scratching out a W from her puzzle and Mary is doing her best at telling her how James Dean and Claudette Colbert and the cinema of her childhood have wiggled their way into the backs of her eyes.

“I mean it’s not that I think black and white is a better way to film things, in actuality, I just think I can appreciate them more. It’s, it’s a nostalgia thing, I know.” Marlene looks up at this small woman with hair for miles and lakes of seaweed for eyes and an expanse of skin so brown it warms the eyes to look on. And she thinks this perhaps is the human condition, because as the eyes make bends and shadows of the two dimensional projection of the world on the slick of the retina, a make believe of colors and shapes, so does the mind make believe of phantoms and spirits and memory and sin.

She thinks every person is exploding with want for the make believe. So much so the skin is too tight for itself and they all sit as statues in their present states with these wants slipping out their ears. And for what?

It’s all orbital chaos with no chance of collision.

Marlene is about to open her mouth up and around this existential crisis of human conscious and blather on about childhood when there’s a pop, like air bursting from within itself, and one Dorcas Meadows is doubled over her knees in the middle of Mary’s living room.

Marlene stands abruptly and Dorcas, looking up, still slumped over her sweatpants and Dead Kennedy’s shirt, hunkers further into herself. 

“Marlene?” Dorcas asks, she looks down again, panting, “What’re, what’re you doing here?”

“Got hammered with Mary, naturally. And you?”

“Just saying hi.”

“You can knock,” Mary says, but Dorcas, with eyes for Marlene and what must be a rumpled mess of personage staring back at her, barely processes it.

“Also went to yours.”

“Dorcas, let’s sit down,” Marlene says and begins to slowly edge to Dorcas’s crumple of a body.

“She is not allowed to vomit on my couch!” Mary asserts with that so familiar bullet casing of a voice.

“In the bathroom,” Marlene adds.

–

Marlene has her arm around Dorcas’s shoulders as they sit on the cool tile of Mary’s bathroom, in the blue light of day’s beginning, and Dorcas tries not to heave.

“You don’t think I could have dislocated my pancreas, do you?” Dorcas asks and she sounds soppingly miserable.

“Not likely.”

“You’re so warm and not moving. These are good things.”

“What’s going on Dorcas?”

“Oh just, just can’t think straight.”

“Is it the mission?”

“Kingsley nearly got his throat slit.”

It is too heavy for words and what would they do anyway? 

Sink. Marlene tucks Dorcas against her side and they sit still as statues, as murals of people, pretending in this way that the outside is fully separate from the ruins of insides they don’t want seen.

“And you?” Marlene asks.

“I-“ Dorcas begins and ends for three long minutes. All the silence gets stuck on their tongues like hungover saliva until Dorcas says, hollow, “I didn’t hesitate. I- Not even a bit. Whoever it was, whoever, well they’ll never be again. As in I-“

“You don’t have to say it,” Marlene says and she wonders if it is because she can’t hear it, not again, again.

“They aren’t dead, they just. I don’t know why I did it, it’s almost unimaginably cruel but of course it was the first thing I imagined. I scrambled their brain Marlene. Fuck isn’t that worse than death? Who are they now but a walking husk of nothing, longing, empty.” Dorcas looks at her, long, eyes dry, mouth wide. She smells like the electricity unique to dark magic, like evil static sweaters and thunder clouds rolling black. It hurts her through her nose, down to her electrified heart.

“Oh fuck Dorcas,” she says and holds her closer, “oh fuck. You saved Kingsley’s life. You- yeah. Oh fuck.”

In the end, under the streaming daylight of 1 PM, through the settled dust of living and the unsettled dust of a Dying, well it’s just another thing to carry. Marlene has killed three people and for each she feels an ache in the body, in nowhere in particular, in the blue blood of her veins, as a writhing, coursing, consuming ache. It gnaws at her, small insects of grief; she wonders daily what will be left of her in a few years’ time, what with the biting, the eating away. She wonders who she is now. Marlene has fully fled and this being, with her name, she rots on the hour and who holds her but Dorcas? Who can touch a corpse in the making.

Dorcas has now in essence killed two and they share these things only with each other. In this way their bones soften together, in this way they melt as candles, in this way they stare blankly at Mary’s bathroom wall until they can fumble up words and legs and finally fumble enough to leave. 

In the dark hours that night, lying awake, cracked like eggs, like pavement, like skulls, Marlene can’t help but feel as if her body is floating away from her. And when Dorcas knocks, when they curl together like two skeletons to be found by the archeologists of tomorrow, at least she has company in ghosts, six near seven choked up together in their two bodies as the moon makes slices of their organs and the feel their fingers no more. 

In a thick blackness of night everfolding Marlene takes Dorcas’ hands, thin as paper things, and holds them so close to her chest it all creases into each other and morning comes just a stitch faster than it would have. 

–

“You’re actually good with eggs,” Dorcas says. She is pretty in the sun, soft, and yet below her eyes grows blackness, her shoulders have growths of pain so verdantly thick she sags and Marlene loves her now, but also loves her back then.

“Yeah?” Marlene asks.

“Yeah.”

“Well it’s about all I make so I really fucking hope at this point,” she says and flips the omelet and is actually proud of how sexy and confident it is of her, especially since it lands so smooth. Sizzle.

“Wow,” Dorcas coos and leans on Marlene and she breathes funny for a second and the world is okay if you can be dumb and gay with your best friend, mustn’t it be?

They eat over a crossword puzzle neither of them are particularly good at, they laugh like they’re forcing sounds from their chests and they smile in a way that hurts, that pulls and pulls at strings of mourning until it all comes unwound, natural again. Their bodies are old egg timers getting rusty and tougher to reset. 

Marlene wants to tell Dorcas she thinks this but with her body, so thin now, see there are her ribs, does she eat enough? With it thin as twigs in her skin, she is less sure now what to say than ever. That bit is new and she frowns around it upon occasion but today she is practicing being a person who likes to smile, with Dorcas, so they don’t frown but smile over puppies in the newspaper and the books they’re reading and the little things they manage to cough up that are cute and charming until they have constructed a world of banter, tall towers of barbs, streets of wit, sprawling cityscapes of normalcy inside the little living room. It’s all as delicate as dust but caught in the moment like a fly in the web it is as if the world is okay again. 

That night they will part as if they want to, and when midnight comes they’ll sleep with ghosts between ribs, moans battering lungs until breath is shallow as tides and far distant moons, claws and shadows of bodies turning hearts to caves in which bad memories dwell. But at least one of those ghosts will be the hands and smiles of each other. And that at least will keep grief from taking bone from bone, until tomorrow.

–

Postlude

–

When it rains on Monday, the streets steam. It is the last humid day before fall starts really thinning the air; a last yawn of August. Marlene watches Dorcas’ bright red rain boots make splash work of puddles and puddles; she’s skipping. When they fall into each other, laughing, Marlene can hardly see but she feels every drop of rain off Dorcas’ skin and thinks that is all the map she needs to guide her. They look at each other, smiling, rain dripping from their noses, lips wet with dew, and she thinks Dorcas might kiss her, thinks how Mary is never wrong about things, thinks all of this, until Dorcas kisses her and her wide wet mouth opens in an “oh” quickly swallowed by thunder and Dorcas.

–

It is in the night, the moon shaking, that she presses her thumb, just softly, to where that devilish smile of Dorcas’s usually unsheathes itself. Her lips are soft and wet and slightly parted and the rest of her face, night blue and blackened as shadows, is so sunk with grief and loss and exhaustion Marlene can’t move her fingers for risk of drowning the whole of her self in the once was of her best friend. Dorcas wore it all, acne and defiance and love, on the skin of her cheeks. Now, in the oil sink of night, it’s all mold black and impenetrable. This, of course, is the hollow shadow war makes of the spritely teenage body, hiding its tragedies in the mortal being. Marlene knows she’s spun up with it all too, thick to the roots of her hair with coils of fear. 

She kisses Dorcas, just softly, watches as her eyes flutter past the dark spots of sleep and Dorcas looks at her like she is a crazy night creature, Marlene half ghost in the midnight of three thirty AM. 

“What?” Dorcas asks and her voice is so soft and creaking it nearly breaks on her lips.

“Nothing. Just need you to know something.”

“What’s that?”

“That things’ll be alright.”

“Okay.” Dorcas blinks.

“Yep.” Marlene lays herself down next to Dorcas snugly and tries to focus her eyes on the close spot of Dorcas’s nose. “Night.”

“Not even a witching hour fuck?”

Dorcas’s eyes are wide and oh Marlene starts, there in the thick of her deep, deep sorrow shadows, is the candle wick of her flashing smile. This, she thinks, must be how they survive. In war, with spells and death static above the crowns of their heads and thick in their lungs, this is what it means. So she too takes up her remaining Marlene scraps from the bottom barrel of her own self, and in this moonlit state they fuck as two unwhole bodies do.

**Author's Note:**

> title from The Start of Something by Voxtrot https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kjOCY1NX_B8
> 
> marlene and dorcas don't really have personalities lmao so i gave them some.... dorcas as the leader of a girl gang??? so cute ... marlene like how can i b Marlene if i don't have a BoDy??? so. cute. hope u enjoyed. 
> 
> also references to the Germs, specifically their album (GI) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s8QdNg0VZeM&list=PLpvztXgGzYSFP2xEoeZ8D1bnUHYiTSDaz


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